This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my cool employer.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Working together

Open source software is great. Anyone can improve the source code, add features, or just access the source code to better understand the software. The Internet revolution has been fueled by various open source technologies.

Wikipedia is the open source software model applied to a writing a collaborative encyclopedia. It works well.

The Oxford English Dictionary had a similar start. From 1857 to 1928, thousands of people sent examples of word usage not in their dictionaries. A few editors complied this into a dictionary. Sounds pretty similar to wikipedia to me, but with more primitive tools.

Was this the first example of this model? Do you know of other examples? Why is it that we don't see this in more artistic fields, i.e. composing music?

About Me

I am an engineer at Google and love building systems that make information freely accessible or enable communication in an attempt to make the world a smaller and a better place. I grew up in four different countries. Outside work, I love to cycle, dance, paint, cook, try new things, enjoy great food, and spend a lot of time with people I care about. I feel that the count of my failures is the only metric of how often I step out of my comfort zone. So I get worried when I have not failed in a while.